I was on my way to the conference when I saw a talk titled "​Citizens of the World: COP21 Actors" having seen Alec Baldwin just the day before I assumed it was about actors and celebrities making statements about what they want to see for climate change. Well, let's just say I was very wrong. 😬

The talk was really about an organization called World Wide Views. They launched a large world wide poll about climate change, reaching almost 10,000 people in 76 different countries - which just amazed me.

On the 6th of June 2015, they were able to have almost 10,000 people take the same exact poll on climate change. Moderated by trained volunteers to stay as neutral and unbiased as possible. At the conference they provided a print out booklet of the report, and when I say booklet I mean almost 50 pages. Below is a video about their project.

The reason I wanted to write about this specific talk is that this idea and this organization was summed up perfectly at the debate about the poll,

"This is real democracy." -Yves Mathieu Co-Coordinator of WWViews on Climate and Energy

This is what I feel we need to get real information and realise what we need to do to get an idea of how literate the world is in climate change. After looking over the report, I posted this:

This program and organization is what made me feel truly hopeful about the public and their knowledge of climate change and I hope the organization continues to host a poll on Climate Change.

Here's a link to their website where you can look through the report. http://climateandenergy.wwviews.org (Picture below is taken from the report.)

Needless to say, almost everyone in the United States has witnessed some form of a natural disaster. The map above leaves out wild fires but Jill lives out in the west where it's most prone to them and we're going to let her talk about them more closely. The graphs below show the change of natural disaster trends over the past 40 years, the left being the number of disasters per decade, also split into type and the right shows deaths caused by each type also spread over the past 40 years.

Natural disasters don't only affect the local area but also have a nation-wide effect. For example, Hurricane Katrina devastated southern states; it was estimated that more than 10% of Mississippi's cotton crops were destroyed. Gas prices shot up to $6-$8 in some of the lower states on Labor Day weekend and more northern states received a 40-70 cent jump.

Luckily, the United States showed their unity and launched dozens of campaigns to help pay for the rebuild, recover and regrowth of the affected areas.

The more we allow climate change to occur the more natural disasters will be caused.

Hey everyone! My name is Gilbert Vial and I'm a senior forensic chemi﻿stry major at York College in York, PA. I grew up in Columbia, Maryland.

Photo found at http://s3-media2.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/JYNDBGkFB8-H-HuNlVgubg/l.jpg . . . Above is a picture of Lake Elkhorn in Columbia.

Growing up here, we never heard much about Climate Change, most of my science classes were filled with Bill Nye. (Sorry about getting the song stuck in your head!) I didn't have a strong interest in climate change until I started studying chemistry in college. My advisor and professor for my Ethics seminar had us working on different videos to help explain climate change to younger children, students our age and our parents generation. Working with that professor, I had a stronger exposure to different areas of the climate change science, from polar bears, to CO2, and I'm still extremely interested in learning more about climate change and I am so excited for the opportunity to learn more. With that being said I plan on passing on what I learn so that students who didn't have a strong exposure can quickly "catch up" and help to prevent any more damage to our planet.

I really believe it's up to our generation and the coming ones to turn this around. Like I said earlier, Bill Nye was my first exposure to science, here's a video of him explaining climate change with emojis, the critical part is getting younger generations involved early!